Accept the darkness within!

Heart. She/they

[saccharinemeat]

hi! VERY strong anti here. trying to be civil. just genuinely asking, why do you like proships. genuinely. why. what makes them so good to you? to me, they, well, make me feel nauseous and gross. sometimes even violated depending on what it is. what about these, honestly, gross ships is so good to you? what makes you think they're good? i'm not looking for an argument. just,, answers.

Alright, I'll answer in good faith here, because i really appreciate not picking a fight or an argument

First off, please, don't say , "you like proships" proship doesn't mean "problematic ships", it means "pro" (as in favor of) shipping, that is to say, it's an anti harassment stance on letting people do whatever they want, based off the old fandom saying "ship and let ship"

you dont need to like problematic ships to be proship, you just need to be against harassment of people who enjoy darker or more 'edgy' media, and that's it

As for you question in itself, it's complicated, some problematic ships i enjoy stem from my own trauma and family issues, particularly my abusive mother. Reading and making content with parental !ncest gives me comfort through the fact that its an inconditional , codependent love. In fiction it feels comforting, but i know reality is way different first hand.

For age gap ships, theres a whole aspect about having someone take care of you, and also again, love regardless of situation, plus there is self insertion as it makes me think of back when i was a teen and had crushes on older people. I couldn't act on them, and I knew that any adult willing to date a child is no good. But within fiction,you can write about it and it would be harmless, generally speaking

For dead dove or more problematic stuff,such as abusive relationships, theres again the desire for love no matter what, and the situations those develop in, are usually trauma bonding for the involved characters

Now, these are not the ONLY reasons i enjoy such ships. There's also the aspect that i just like some of them aesthetically, or i see their chemistry in a romantic light, Or i have a streak of sadism towards a certain character.

Another reason is the potential for interesting fan content, particularly fanfiction, wholesome ships are sweet and cute and can be hot even, but it's all very by the book. The exploration of their emotions, thoughts and actions in messed up situations is more interesting to me

For sibling !ncest particularly, i just feel that they're usually developed in such a way that it can easily be seen as romantic, since we spend so much time with them, and seeing them fight and bond and laugh and promise to be together, that it just clicks different

and, It's understandable that you feel nauseated and grossed out by a lot of these, in fact, there are problematic ships and tropes i hate and despise, despite the fact that i love other messed up content for example

- I hate bully/victim ships

- I hate uncle/niece ships

- I hate cheating stories

- I hate forced feminization

- I dislike enemies to lovers

- I dislike anything involving characters I consider too young

- I dislike vomit and sick fic

a lot of people love these! but i dont! some of them make my skin crawl! but i dont go and yell at them, i dont comment on their things, I just block them and move on, and focus on the stuff i DO like ,which is what i generally suggest

Fictional exploration of darker stories is okay, and generally harmless. I know the argument that it can be used to gr00m people, but truly, that's not the fault of the content or its creator, the blame is fully on the gr00mer.

Also, if we started banning or bashing things that can be used to gr00m others, we'd have to ban stuff like plushies, candy, adult collectionists of cartoon merch, comics, books,etc etc

ANYTHING can be used to gr00m a person, if there's a gr00mer targeting them. nothing is safe if there's an actual pro contact ped0phile with the intention to gr00m a child. The only way to prevent these things is to be taught about them, and to learn to not take life advice from fanfiction, which should be a given.

Like seriously, think about it. let's see, a safe hobby, non fandom related....

okay, imagine theres a minor who's very interested in learning about history and historical maps of the world.

This kid joins an unsupervised group online, and talks about wanting to make friends, and does make some nice, age appropriate friends

They feel generally safe online

Then,a gr00mer targets them, befriends them and brings up the fact that they collect maps, and they love history just like the kid.

then moves into talking about 'old customs' and starts planting the idea that old societies were in the right about child marriage and so on, until they actually gets what they want, and commits a crime.

The gr00mer didn't need a fanfic to convince the kid

they just needed to manipulate the child into trusting them, using whatever the kid liked.

who do you think it's at fault here?

the kid? the history book? the group? the internet? Nope.

It's the gr00mer's fault for targeting the child

and it's the parent's fault for not teaching online safety to their kid.

[transfaguette]

"but AO3 hosts content that contains abuse!" please never go to a local library ever.

[blackberryjambaby]

my local library doesn't have child porn

[transfaguette]

neither does AO3.

This is the one thing I will be pedantic about. Because this post was about how people get mad about AO3 donations when in reality it is not much different at all from a library including in the content it hosts. CSAM is illegal. If AO3 hosted it, they would face serious repercussions.

However fucked up you feel it is, fictionalized writings are not CSAM. And there are countless published books that contain similar writings. I'm not here to tell you how that's supposed to make you feel, just that AO3 discourse is fucking stupid.

[hoarder-of-stories-27]

It's important to acknowledge the difference between propaganda and fun fiction.

Some stories have a message of "this thing that would be bad in real life is actually good in real life" - that's harmful. Some stories have a message of "this thing that would be bad in real life is hot or interesting to explore in fiction" - that's fine.

It's also very important to learn to recognize the difference between those two things. No, that piece of dead dove fanfiction is not arguing that the actions taken in the piece would be good in real life. If it were arguing that, it would be tagged something like "healthy relationships that should be emulated", not "abuse".

[parakeet]

that post where someone calls out staff for being aot/harry potter fans and immediately got banned for it has been having its reblogs deleted (i manually deleted mine tbf bc i saw the reblogs going down and it freaked me out) but that is one of the wildest things ive seen on this site. lol [link fwiw]

[parakeet]

bruh they turned rbs off

[mainblogging]

the reblog you linked to it was removed, as well. i have a screenshot of the post, but not with the original pictures.

i don’t know if anyone has the removed pictures.

edit: it looks like my reblog was removed, too, so i guess every reblog of the post may have been taken down?

[transfaabulous]

….They banned the user and took down the post because the callout accused a staff member of being a child predator. The “evidence” for which is rooted in fucking fandom drama.

The original post took actual, real life sexual assault of children, and put it on the same level as a G-rated piece of fanart that had nothing to do with anything sexual, or even the barest hint at suggestion of such a thing, at all.

This is heinous misbehavior that has been circling in online fandoms for a long time now. But in the real world, these are serious fucking claims that get taken to court, and if you end up directing them towards someone over this bullshit you get in trouble with the law for defamation of character because CHILD RAPE IS NOT YOUR PLAYMOBIL TOY HAMMER TO HIT PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU DISLIKE.

CHILD RAPE IS SERIOUS. ACCUSATIONS OF CHILD RAPE ARE SERIOUS. THIS IS NOT A FUCKING GAME.

IF YOU LOOK AT AN INNOCENT IMAGE AND SEE THE SEXUALIZATION OF CHILDREN THERE, THAT SAYS MORE ABOUT THE DANGER YOU POSE TO OTHERS THAN ANYTHING ELSE.

If you legitimately didn’t know, that’s one thing. I am not blaming anyone for having been lied to. But if you did?

The OP of that post got off damn fucking easily by just getting their account terminated, and I hope they and everyone who supported this who knew the actual content of the “callout” understands the full weight of the shame and horror they should feel at condoning and perpetuating this. How dare you. How fucking dare you use such a serious, life-ruining, evil thing as a fucking toy in your arguments.

Fuck you.

[eroticcannibal]

Aight can we see every other fuck throwing around fake pedophilia accusations get deleted too? Like that is the only thing to be outraged at here. That staff can only be bothered to protect their own.

[theothin]

part of supporting transfems is supporting people who, as far as they or anyone else knows at the time, are straight guys getting off to f/f fantasies

part of supporting transmascs is supporting people who, as far as they or anyone else knows at the time, are straight girls getting off to m/m fantasies

TERFs and other shitheads act like those are bad things. they aren’t. there’s nothing wrong with either of those groups, whether or not someone turns out to be trans

[theothin]

this also goes for people into weird porn that gets accused of “fetishizing” trans people. who gives a fuck. some will turn out to be trans, and the others still don’t need an excuse

[fluxphage]

i genuinely struggle with this as ive been fetishized by people irl from watching that kind of content- do you have any resources around deconstructing that feeling?

[theothin]

I don’t have resources per se, but a friend of mine added some good tags that I think might help with reframing it:

to expand a bit - for a given community, we can divide people into four groups based on if they’re respectful of boundaries for people in that community and if they’re into fetish stuff about that community. picking arbitrary numbers for them:

respectful, no fetish

respectful, fetish

not respectful, no fetish

not respectful, fetish

group 1 doesn’t have either concern. group 2 should know to keep it private and not say/do anything inappropriate. group 3 won’t bring up fetish stuff specifically, but they may say other inappropriate/obnoxious stuff because of that lack of boundaries. group 4 is the ones that specifically say inappropriate stuff about the fetish

under this framing, groups 3 and 4 are the issues - the people without that understanding/respect for boundaries, regardless of any fetish stuff. admittedly, this is an oversimplification - the reality is more of a sliding scale than a binary, and you could make a case that for some people, such fetishes could contribute to eroding the boundaries? but so could other contributing factors, and I don’t think there’s any good way to try to prevent the fetishes themselves. the way I see it, the best way to address the issues is to focus directly on better regard for those boundaries, so people will do the right thing regardless

does that help at all?

[fluxphage]

yeah that genuinely does, thank you!

[chillyravenart]

THISSSSSS 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼

[didntwantanaccount]

Reading darkfic only gives me empathy for the characters, doesn't make me evil.

[duran-duran-less-official]

How's this for a hot take?

Consuming dark fiction, though it allows the audience to empathise with morally dubious or outright evil characters, nonetheless increases their overall amount of internal empathy towards other people. Not just bad people benefit from an overall increase in empathy.

Consuming exclusively sanitised, fluffy feel-good fiction with no counterbalancing dark sides does not increase the audience's empathy, because anyone who cannot empathise with The Littlest Cinnamon Roll, who has adventures dealing with happiness and friendship and harmony, is already a lost cause. Rather, such fiction, when all other kinds are excluded, normalises the idea that the only people worth empathising with are the morally pure cinnamon rolls who have never done anything wrong in their entire lives. The normalisation, and reinforcement of same through the standard life cycle of a fandom, reaches such a point that as soon as the characters in question step outside the boundaries of that bubble of innocence by doing (1) problematic thing, they are cancelled for crimes against humanity and the fandom tears itself apart.

This is my explanation for not only why fandoms for fun kids' shows tear themselves apart over the slightest perceived creative slip-up, but also why the most passionately engaged fans of these things (who more often than not precipitate the rot/collapse) tend to be such toxic people in all other spheres of life as well.

[wetwareproblem]

It’d be a lot better if you weren’t making the all-too-common mistake of confusing ‘empathy’ with ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’ and thus throwing all sorts of people with non-normative empathy under the bus in the process.

I do not have affective empathy. At all. No amount of reading any sort of fiction is going to make me spontaneously develop it. Mirror neurons broke.And yet, I still recognize the moral responsibility to not abuse people. I still go to great lengths to keep my issues my own with minimal splash on others, and to support and uplift the people around me.

Because, as it turns out, empathy doesn’t magically make you a good person. It’s ridiculously easy to hijack or circumvent - all you need to do is get people to empathize with these people and not those ones. It is not equivalent to kindness, or compassion, or morality, or anything else, and the pervasive assumption that it is feeds directly into the sort of assholes you’re talking about refusing to check their behavior and consider that they could be the bad guys.

Don’t do that.

[grinningjackal]

Terfs vehemently hate all "men" until it's convenient to "protect gay men" from queer trans guys and so many people will fall for it because it's couched in "fujoshi" discourse

[fanficmemes]

Not to start discourse but sometimes it makes me really fucking pissed off that people compare me being raped as a child to some 200 word dddne on ao3

[porkbuttsandtaters]

tumblr media criticism

[fuckblast]

hobbits win again

[harassmentsucks]

ableism and fake claiming

[peenalize]

if fiction doesnt affect reality why do i have fictrojects? checkmate.

[pr0blematic-cl0wn]

wild how that’s not an argument anyone is making. sincerely, someone else with fictives in our system.

oh, also, dont crosstag

[zelarina-deactivated20220529]

Reminder as a proshipper I do not support Hypnotist Sappho!

Reblog if you agree, they are an absolutely vile person!

[ebp-brain]

banned books week: fic edition

What do we lose when we condemn the existence of fanworks that include unhealthy, traumatic, violent, or otherwise difficult material?

I grew up celebrating the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week every year, and it has profoundly impacted my views on censorship. While progressive fan communities are generally against banning commercially published literature, sometimes well-meaning fans condemn the existence of fanworks that portray unhealthy, traumatic, or violent material in the interest of protecting people from it. I wanted draw a connection between the kind of censorship that those fans suggest and the kind applied to frequently banned works of commercial literature that we consider politically and artistically vital. What are we losing when we condemn fic that deals with difficult material?

When fanworks are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., we should certainly critique them! That’s not in question here. What I wanted to highlight with this post is what we lose if we attempt to enact a general ban on, or refuse to ever engage with, any fanworks that portray less than perfectly “good” behaviors and experiences.

It would be impossible to talk about this without offering endless thanks to @transformativeworks and their maintenance of Archive of Our Own, whose tagging system works to ensure that readers can navigate difficult material as safely as possible. <3 <3 <3

under the cut: image descriptions

Keep reading

[mukhannath]

ohh my word this is such a bad comparison 

not only were these books banned by ppl in power (schools, churches) and therefore not comparable to some teenager “anti” on the internet who doesn’t like ur lil fanfic 

also these books all dont romanticize ‘difficult topics’ like the fanfics we object to do (those being the pedo and incest ones). dont pretend that thats the same thing, and if you are gonna, slap Lolita up there instead of like, yknow actually intelligently written books that can handle shit maturely 

[sunfortune]

only on tumblr dot com will you find takes This far removed from reality

[nerdlingwrites]

P.S. PEOPLE OF COLOR AND QUEER PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZE THE PLATFORMING OF CERTAIN TYPES OF FICTION AND THE WAY AO3 HANDLES THEM ARE NOT FUCKING ANTIS YOU INCREDIBLE FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Holy shit I think I found an even worse take than OPs in the notes. Imagine having the fucking unmitigated GALL, to speak over black women and our objections to some of AO3s priorities by trying to use Octavia Butler as a weapon to silence us. It’s deeply obvious you know nothing about Butler and her work even if you claim to have read it, you utterly failed to understand it.

Butler wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, she wasn’t writing treatises on moral relativism, her writing spoke to the incredibly difficult choices that marginalized people (particularly black people and black women especially) have been forced to make for centuries to survive the horrors that the white supremacist establishment forces on us. It spoke against human hierarchies that lead to our own destruction and the use of “taboo” subjects is used to AGAIN illustrate centuries of abuse and the heroic nature of survival.

You are so completely wrong about everything you said, and so racist in your framing that it’s quite literally painful to me to read your bullshit. How dare you try to twist her work and message and use it against us.

In short, fuck you @lierdumoa, keep Octavia Butler’s name out your mouth.

[lierdumoa]

I am queer and Black and Asian. You are literally accusing me of speaking over myself. You are accusing me of stealing the mic from myself. You are accusing me of silencing myself. Octavia Butler wrote books about mixed race children grappling with their flawed heritage. That’s why I got into her books in the first place. Because my Black Trinidadian great grandmother worked on a sugar plantation and bore 17 of her slaver’s children. Because my Asian grandfather was a refugee of the Hakka diaspora. Because I’m queer and the first book I ever read that had anything resembling a queer character was Butler’s Imago – a story about a nonbinary human/alien hybrid (who used biochemical coersion to form a soulmate bond with a pair of blood related siblings, followed by 4 full pages of fuck-or-die threesome incest sex, but I digress).

The irony is I was actually addressing my post to white anti’s who exploit the marginalization of POC to justify censorship. But you automatically assumed I was white, and that I was criticizing the actions of POC, I guess because I used the term “moral relativism” and you had a kneejerk reaction to the term.

Which I can empathize with, because I myself have had that term mansplained to me by racist white men.

But it doesn’t mean what racist white men think it means, and I don’t use it the way racist white men use it.

The irony is that I actually agree with your interpretation of Butler’s work.

I was, in fact, trying to point out that your interpretation, which I agree with, is in itself, a morally relativistic interpretation. 

You recognize that the behavior Butler’s characters exhibit cannot be measured out of context according to an oversimplistic ethical metric that attempts to shove all behavior into a neat binary of “people who [insert action] are bad and people who don’t [insert action] are good.” I agree!

You recognize that the behavior of Butler’s characters, and also of marginalized people is dependent on too many outside factors –  the long term effects of generational abuse, the coercive environment in which those behaviors take place, the power structures at play, etc.

You see the term moral relativism, and maybe your only experience with that term is having it mansplained to you racist white guys, so you have a kneejerk reaction to automatically dismiss anyone who says it.

But when I use the term moral relativism, I actually mean it in the sense of how you interpreted Octavia Butler’s work – as a way of recognizing how environment, class structure, history, generational abuse, etc. serve as coercive factors. As a way of recognizing how real life policies based on overly simplistic moral absolutes that don’t take into account context tend to backfire and perpetuate the very problems they’re supposedly designed to cure.

When I say moral relativism, I’m acknowledging the reality that it’s actually virtually impossible justify to a panel of censors determined to purge all the so called evil stories, that your four pages of kinky mind rape incest porn involving the nonbinary alien hybrid with 9 fingered tentacle hands is different from those other, dirtybadwrong mindrape incest fic with nine fingered tentacle aliens, because actually, your story is using the tentacle alien incest threesome porn to make a meaningful cultural commentary about white hegemony.

The reason we have Butler’s stories is not because she got the censorship panel’s approval to publish, based on the merit of her story’s larger themes. 

It’s because we as a society decided we weren’t going to let censorship panels decide what science fiction novels books can and cannot be published. 

It really is exhausting being on tumblr.

I am a person of color, I am queer, I am multiracial, I have a vagina, I have ADHD, and I have been criticizing racism and biphobia and homophobia for the past 20 years, all while working to unlearn my own internalized shit and figure out my own queer identity, and I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SUBMIT A 27 GB  DATABANK OF MY COMPLETE PERSONAL ANALYTICS COLLECTED BY GOOGLE AND SOLD TO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA every time I express half an opinion.

And when I defend AO3, I defend it not as a race traitor, nor as a deluded centrist, but rather as a pragmatist who has seen this shit before, and recognizes that many of tumblr’s ideas for protecting women and poc have already been attempted and have backfired spectacularly in ways that actually harmed queer women of color – the very groups these policies were proposed to protect – and the very groups I myself am a member of – the most.

I’m so sick of this exact conversation.

I’m sick of telling puritannical white saviors to stop using my identity to justify censorship, only to have reactionary fools – whose own internalized racism leads them to assume their own people are a monolith and every stranger who disagrees with them on the internet is white – tell me I sound too white to be allowed to have a voice about my own goddamn marginalization.

[just-antithings]

*whispers* guys what’s a half-proship

[notsimplysusurrus]

Let’s stop making fun of people for really liking things 2k19

[notsimplysusurrus]

Let’s stop making fun of people for really liking things 2k20

[notsimplysusurrus]

Let’s stop making fun of people for really liking things 2k21

[notsimplysusurrus]

Let’s stop making fun of people for really liking things 2k22

[catboy-syrup]

ngl, I honestly never thought the phrase “Hey, I think Pedophiles are disgusting and I don’t want them or their supporters anywhere near me or my blog, even if they call themselves non-offending or anti-contact” would be a such a controversial opinion but like, then again this is tumblr, anything can be considered controversial on here. /hj

[xxthefairywitchxx]

Man I am so sick of finding out mental health blogs are run by antis. You don't fucking care about people's mental health, you suicide bait people for your own sick amusement, to feel better than them. Fuck off, stop acting like you give a shit about neurodivergent people. You only care about neurodivergent people, or survivors or minors or poc or whoever if they sit there and prop up your arguments that 'Suicide baiting freaks is perfectly fine and acceptable actually, because fictional characters matter more than people I personally deem below me UWU' Fuck off.